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Even the roof of the world is not immune to climate change. New research indicates that Mount Everest and its surrounding peaks are losing their ice cover, and that snowfall in the region has been declining since the 1990s amidst warming temperatures.

Over the past 50 years, the snow line has receded nearly 600 feet up the mountain and glaciers in the region have shrunk by 13 percent, the researchers report. Smaller glaciers, less than half a square mile, are melting the quickest and have shrunk by about 43 percent since the 1960s. Most glaciers in the national park, they found, are shrinking at an increasing rate.

The team arrived at these findings by surveying around 700 square miles surrounding Mount Everest and comparing the current conditions to past images reconstructed from satellite imagery and maps. They relied upon data collected by observatory stations and Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology for calculating temperature fluctuations throughout the years. Since 1992, they found, the Everest region has increased in temperature by nearly two degrees Fahrenheit while snowfall decreased by almost four inches during that same period.

While the researchers cannot definitively link the changes seen on Mount Everest and its surroundings to increases in human-generated greenhouse gases, they strongly suspect climate change is the culprit behind their observations.

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Parasitic hookworms in a person’s intestinal lining. Photo: CDC Public Health Image Library

Of the neglected tropical diseases, parasitic worms, or helminths, are one of the most common maladies. Diseases like this, caused by parasite or bacteria, kill around 534,000 a year, according to the CDC.  These have been largely wiped out in developed countries, but they still persist in the poorest parts of the world. People pick up infections by walking or consuming bits of contaminated soil in areas where sanitation is poor. After a person becomes infected, he perpetuates the infection in others through feces teeming with worm eggs.

Treating the worms is usually straight forward, but doctors must first determine whether or not a person is infected. Microscopes are not always available in poor communities, however, since they are difficult to transport and break easily. To get around this, an international team of doctors have developed an impromptu microscope by sticking a cheap lens onto his iPhone using double-sided tape. The New York Times describes the contraption:

The invention, described recently in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, was tested in Tanzania on 200 stool samples from children who had a mix of hookworms, roundworms and giant roundworms.

A three-millimeter ball lens was taped over the camera lens of an iPhone 4. The zoom was increased to maximum, and slides, with tape atop the samples, were pressed right up to the lens. A pen flashlight shone light through the slide.

The improvised microscope detected giant roundworm eggs 81 percent of the time, roundworm eggs 54 percent of the time and hookworm eggs 14 percent of the time. The latter parasite may evade detection because it produces fewer eggs which also tend to degrade quickly outside of the body, the Times writes.

In order for doctors to determine whether or not to treat a person or village with anti-helminth medication, they need to have a microscope that performs with at least 80 percent accuracy. Unfortunately, the iPhone scope delivered results at just 70 percent accuracy compared to a conventional microscope. But with increasingly high tech smartphone cameras frequently introduced, the Times points out, the iPhone may soon find its place as a diagnostic tool after all.

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The tiny bladder of the humped bladderwort plant. Photo: Enrique Ibarra-Laclette, Claudia Anahí Pérez-Torres and Paulina Lozano-Sotomayor

The carnivorous bladderwort plant is a small aquatic species with cheery yellow flowers. It uses tiny traps that act like vacuums (the “bladders” in its name) to suck up prey such as water fleas. It’s a complex little plant. But compared to, say, a tomato, the bladderwort has extremely short DNA—just 80 million DNA base pairs to a tomato’s 780 million.

Tomatoes, like humans, have long strands of DNA that don’t do much. Only 2 percent of the human genome codes for genes—the portion of DNA that contains instructions for building proteins and functional RNA chains. The rest is known as noncoding or junk DNA. Researchers still speculate about the role of this genetic matter, which dominates the genome of not only humans but many other organisms, too.

Not the bladderwort, though. The plant’s DNA might be shorter than the tomato’s, but both plants have around 28,500 genes. The bladderwort just doesn’t have the noncoding DNA. Researchers who sequenced the bladderwort’s genome were surprised to find that 97 percent of the plant’s DNA consists of genes and sections of DNA that control those genes. This shows that complex life is possible without all of the junk DNA, they write.

In a paper published in Nature, the researchers hypothesize that—unlike humans and other plants and animals—the bladderwort actively deleted its junk DNA over many years of evolution. Some species, like the bladderwort, may have a built-in mechanism for deleting noncoding DNA, while others, like humans, may favor DNA insertion and duplication, leading to extraneous quantities of junk DNA. Neither mechanism is likely preferable over the other; they simply represent different paths in life.

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Image: Aurora Michele

Having a baby can mean thinking a lot about pee. You pee on a stick to see if you’re ovulating. You pee on a stick to check if you’re pregnant. And soon, you might be able to pee to check your baby’s health. Using urine samples collected from pregnant women, researchers have developed a test that found signs of serious medical issues in the still unborn baby, including Down syndrome, premature birth, brain damage and pre-eclampsia (a disorder that can cause a mother to have seizures).

The new research, conducted by a team of Portuguese researchers lead by Sílvia Diaz, is still in the early stages. But, if the technique bears out it could mean that checking for serious complications will be as easy as peeing in a cup—an alternative to the invasive techniques, like biopsies or umbilical cord blood tests, used today.

The researchers collected urine samples from 300 women who were in the second trimester of their pregnancies. They froze the samples and waited until the baby was born. Then, they combed through the urine with a sensitive analytical technique called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy looking for chemicals that were related with the conditions of the babies. According to the researchers, they found chemicals that could be related to “central nervous system malformations, trisomy 21, preterm delivery, gestational diabetes, intrauterine growth restriction and preeclampsia.”

According to Chemical and Engineering News, the next step is to do bigger and better tests, looking at more mothers from a larger geographic area.

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Photo: S-Ky photography

You would think that we’d know how thunder and lightning work by now. But researchers still puzzle over what, exactly, causes those bright flashes of electrostatic discharge. Lightning electrifies the sky about 100 times per second in various locations around the world, yet the electric fields within thunderclouds seem to have only about a tenth of the strength required for producing a lightning bolt, LiveScience reports.

As it turns out, lightning may have extraterrestrial origins.  This idea is not new:

More than 20 years ago, physicist Alex Gurevich at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow suggested lightning might be initiated by cosmic rays from outer space. These particles strike Earth with gargantuan amounts of energy surpassing anything the most powerful atom smashers on the planet are capable of.

Cosmic rays slamming into air molecules may split those molecules into many electrons, which collide in turn with additional molecules, snowballing into more and more electrons zipping around. Gurevich called this “a runaway breakdown,” LiveScience writes.

In a new paper, Gurevich and colleagues analyzed radio pulses from around 3,800 lightning strikes. They hypothesize that thunderclouds’ highly electrically charged water droplets and ice nuggets allow even the most un-energetic cosmic rays to spark a bolt of lightning if it comes into contact with such a cloud. Researchers know that cosmic rays hit the planet about as frequently as lightning strikes, LiveScience writes, so the theory at least makes sense.

Unfortunately, Gurevich and a number of other scientific groups are still in the process of taking simultaneous measurements of cosmic ray’s energetic particles and the radio pulses lightning produces, which should help determine whether or not the two phenomenon are indeed linked. At least for now, Gurevich’s idea—long ignored by science—is at least being given the attention needed to prove once and for all whether lightning does have extraterrestrial origins.

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